Winning with PPC can be a mystery to marketers. The days when the simple equation of high bid + CTR assumed your ad positioning in search results are long behind us. Today the PPC world has evolved and quality score is the way to gain ad visibility. Merkle | RKG analysts are experts in breaking down the quality score elements and helping brands take the guesswork out of PPC. And, of course, we add to the industry knowledge pool form right here on the RKG blog.

Google’s recently released whitepaper outlining recommendations for the soon to be mandatory Shopping Campaign model offers up best practices for feed optimization, campaign structure, bid management, and mobile strategy. While there’s plenty to dissect in this whitepaper, I found it interesting that Google chose not to mention item ID level targets at all in their structural recommendations.

Today, Google announced an update to the way they calculate and report AdWords Quality Score (QS) to advertisers. This is likely to cause much confusion, doubt and unrest in our industry, but rest assured we believe this change will be neutral-to-positive.

In the AdWords interface, Google provides several pieces of information at the keyword level to help advertisers determine whether a low impression term has a remediable problem. Here are a few things to check.

As a core component of paid search quality score, a strong Click-Through Rate (CTR) is vital for ensuring lower costs per click and higher ad visibility. If you are seeing your CTR decline over months or years it can be concerning, but not necessarily an indication of a problem with your copy or PPC program as a whole.